Adobe volunteers install solar through community giving project with GRID Alternatives

At Adobe, employees with questions or ideas about sustainability turn to the Green Team, a group of passionate volunteers who are helping Adobe employees become more sustainable, both at home and at work. Many Adobe employee homeowners in San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle expressed interest in lowering their utility costs and using solar energy but weren’t sure where to start. As a result, Adobe’s Green Team engaged our West Coast employees in a SunShares program, a solar group-buy model designed to overcome common challenges to solar installations by pooling employee buying power and guiding them through the installation process, enabling employee groups to secure significant discounts on purchasing or leasing solar installations.

Sunshares was developed by the City of San Jose as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar America Cities Initiative. The Adobe Green Team SunShares program educated more than 100 employees about the opportunity through webinars and workshops, and included Adobe employees in the contractor vetting and selection process. The employees selected SunPower*, who delivered a 20 percent discount on solar electric systems in addition to leasing options to Adobe employees, family members, friends and neighbors of employees in San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. The group exceeded its goal of 150 participants and a total of 24 installations representing 124 kilowatts of new solar energy capacity were completed in September 2012.

The SunPower Foundation, GRID Alternatives and the SunShares team also developed a combined giving campaign and raised $7,500 to sponsor a 3.88 kW solar installation volunteer workday on the home of a local low-income family in East San Jose. Adobe employees volunteered and brought solar power to a family in need.

*Adobe does not endorse SunPower.

Adobe Green Team SunShares participant and homeowner, Anna Luong, presents her new solar system

For the past five years, Adobe has partnered with SAP and KaBOOM! to build playgrounds in the Bay Area.
With executive sponsorship from Matt Thompson and support from Mark Garrett and Ann Lewnes, this event has been a tremendous opportunity for teams at Adobe to come together in a fun way and make an impact on the community.

Last week, more than 110 Adobe employees from Worldwide Field Operations, Global Marketing and Finance brought their tools and smiles to create a new playground for Escuela Popular in San Jose, a family learning center that builds on students’ social, linguistic and cultural strengths with the intent to develop bilingual, bi-cultural students fully prepared to continue on to higher education and empowered to pursue their goals. Not only does it serve 600 children during school hours, Escuela Popular has the Alum Rock Youth Center on site, which operates a Boys & Girls Club and other programming for school-age children from the community every day after school, and the campus is open to the community from sunrise to sunset on weekends.

“When we first visited Escuela Popular, we knew this was the perfect site. Escuela Popular is a great school in a community that totally deserves a playground. We know the playground will be put to good use during and after school and on the weekends,” says Julia Love, Senior Program Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility.

In less than six hours, more than 300 volunteers from Adobe, SAP and the community:

• Mixed 16,000 pounds of concrete
• Moved 170 cubic yards of mulch
• Moved 10 cubic yards of decomposed granite
• Moved 10 cubic yards of top soil
• Built 4 child picnic tables
• Built 8 benches
• Built 1 green child size garden tunnel
• Built 4 raised planters and 8 planter boxes
• Built and painted 3 trash containers
• Built 1 amazing outdoor classroom

There was a special sense of collaboration for this year’s build. Many of employees raised their hands to help out before the event took place. “Even the planning process itself evoked a sense of community within Adobe,” says Katie Hingle, Director of Licensing Programs, Business Model Strategy and Pricing Operations Group and a 3-year veteran KaBOOMer and build captain. “There were so many things that needed to happen before the build day. It was amazing how quickly we were able to get support from others wanting to play a role in this event. You could tell that the KaBOOM! build really resonates with employees and gives them a sense of pride knowing that Adobe supports KaBOOM’s mission to promote creative play for children in our local communities.”

Stephen Snyder, VP of WW Channel Sales, shares his experience at the build: “This was a fantastic event and a great way to give back to the community. I am proud to work for a company that gets together with other Bay Area companies to support the community in which we work.”

Learn more about Adobe’s Corporate Social Responsibility efforts and see pictures from the day on our FB page.

Earth Day is an annual reminder of the ways in which individuals can pitch in to do something for our planet. At Adobe, we are proud to be recognized as a green company and to empower employees to create a culture of environmental sustainability. This year, the Adobe Green Team and Action Committees setup multiple opportunities for employees to contribute to a healthy, sustainable environment not just for one day, but throughout the month of April. Here are some highlights of the earth friendly events and activities that employees participated in:

Waltham Fields Community Farms: Boston employees volunteered at Waltham Fields Community Farms with transplanting, weeding, mulching to help support the farm’s mission to grow produce for local soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries.

Employees at the Waltham Farms event

Fremont Street Clean: Seattle employees participated in the Fremont Street Clean to help pick up debris and trash from adopted streets near the Adobe office.

Guadalupe River Cleanup: right behind headquarters, Adobe has an adopted area of the Guadalupe River and every year, in honor of Earth Day, San Jose employees volunteer to remove trash from the river that supports local fish and birds.

Adobe Green Team SunShares program: the Adobe Green Team successfully launched a SunShares residential solar program, a new initiative that educated employees about solar energy through webinars and workshops, enlisted employees in the contractor vetting and selection process, and provided discounts on solar energy solutions for employee family members, friends, and neighbors in California and Washington. The April event was an end of the program celebration, which included employee testimonials about getting solar installed, cool sustainable giveaways, and a solar panel cake!

GRID Alternatives solar installation and fundraiser: a group of Bay Area employees volunteered with GRID Alternatives – a non-profit organization committed to empowering communities in need by providing renewable energy and energy efficiency services, equipment and training – to install a 3.88 kW solar system for a low-income family home in East San Jose. The Green Team and the San Francisco/San Jose Action Committees raised over $3,500, with donations matched by Adobe, for the GRID Alternatives workday to help bring the power of solar energy to a family in need.

Low-Carbon Living “Green Bag” Lunch and Learn: David Friedman, co-author of Cooler, Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living and deputy director of Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program, shared his thoughts around the most effective ways to cut our global warming emissions by twenty percent or more.

Community Garden Planting Day and Celebration: On April 23, Adobe kicked off the new Community Garden at the San Jose headquarters. Employees signed up in teams to adopt a garden box and planted their first seedlings. Guest speakers at the event included Rosalind Creasy, edible landscaping expert, and Rebecca Jepsen, “Ask a Master Gardener” Mercury News Columnist, who discussed warm weather planting.

Employees at the Community Garden

For more pictures of the Earth Day activities and other volunteer efforts in April, visit the Community Action Month album on the Adobe CSR Facebook page.

We’re excited to announce the release of Adobe & Environmental Sustainability – an Adobe CSR Brief, the first in a series of quarterly Adobe Corporate Social Responsibility reports. This quarter’s report focuses on Environmental Sustainability and highlights a few of our ongoing and new environmentally focused goals and initiatives.

• Achieve Net Zero consumption by 2015 in our United States owned facilities in San Francisco, San Jose and Boston
• Reduce the amount of product packaging used per unit by 40 percent by 2012, and 80 percent by 2014
• Expand our employee-led Green Team to all of our 12 major sites globally by 2015

We’re driving to have our U.S. facilities first to achieve NetZero consumption by 2015 because they are completely under Adobe’s control and  have become the standard by which all of our buildings worldwide are measured. We continue to work toward Net Zero at our other facilities worldwide.

As a result of our efforts, Adobe’s facilities in Noida, India were recently awarded LEED-EBOM (Leadership and Environmental Energy and Design – Existing Buildings: Operation and Maintenance) Silver certification. The 190,000 square foot building is our largest facility outside of North America and our second LEED certified facility outside the U.S.

Visit the Adobe Corporate Social Responsibility Facebook page to learn more.

Adobe Noida Offices

Adobe recently received its tenth LEED-Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) for the company’s Waltham, Mass, office.  It’s an achievement we’re all very proud of and I want to congratulate the Waltham facilities team and our building management firm, Cushman & Wakefield, on their creative ways of boosting our sustainability, including:

• A “retention pond” which naturally filters runoff water from the parking garage and building site to protect the nearby Cambridge Reservoir
• Carpet and tile made of 80% recycled product
• “Light harvesting” to control the dimness/brightness of interior lights and motion sensors to save energy
• Use of sustainable eucalyptus and walnut wood throughout the space
• Rock blasted to make the foundation was ground down and reused for landscaping
• Waterless urinals and touch-less faucets
• Using Adobe products to reduce paper consumption by 75 percent

Also notable is the Waltham team’s achievement of an Energy Star score of 97 and increased recycling rate to 87 percent compared to the City of Boston’s recycling rate at 13 percent.

Adobe’s employees worldwide contribute daily to the sustainability of our operations, and they recognize “good enough is not good enough.” We’re always looking for new and innovative ways to meet today’s environmental challenges.  There’s plenty more we can all easily do every day, so here’s my challenge to companies and individuals alike – - – Recycle.  Compost.  Use sustainable building materials.  Flip off the electricity when you don’t need it.   Get creative and share your learning with others.  Together we can take the strides necessary to make a meaningful contribution.

Today I joined 70 other Adobe employees and traded my high-tech tools for gardening and painting tools at a local volunteer project. We spent the morning at Burnett Middle School in San Jose, which is an Adobe Youth Voices site, painting educational murals, tilling soil and tending the garden beds. Although this project was not a typical day at the office, it’s not an unusual activity for Adobe.

This was just one of 50 volunteer projects that took place week in North America as Adobe celebrated Community Action Week. It’s an Adobe tradition that showcases our commitment to active engagement and volunteerism, and I was so proud to see the level of participation from across our locations.

Hundreds of employees helped out at projects that ranged from sorting food for low-income families to assembling care packages for homeless children to prepping materials at a museum. And this is just the beginning; our global locations will hold their Community Action Week later this month. During this week last year nearly 1,000 Adobe volunteers gave 2,500 hours to the communities across the globe. I have no doubt we’ll see that impact grow this year.

Community Action Week is just one of the many ways Adobe supports the communities in which our employees live and work. Each year we donate our time, talent and money to help address key challenges in our communities and promote arts and creativity. In 2010, Adobe invested more than $57 million in community giving.

Community involvement is central to who we are as a company. In fact, one of our core values is “involved,” and it’s powerful to see that value exemplified by our employees as they rolled up their sleeves in service of our community this week and throughout the year.

Today is Earth Day, and in 2011 we are encouraged by the Earth Day Network to join its “people-powered” campaign of pledging our acts of environmental service, with the goal of reaching a billion Acts of Green by 2012. It’s no secret that as a company, Adobe has been at the forefront of implementing green operating practices – in fact, we were the world’s first business to achieve four Platinum-level certifications for energy and environmental design excellence by the U.S. Green Building Council.

This year I also find myself reflecting on the various ways that our enterprise technology helps organizations leverage green business practices that ultimately help them decrease their environmental footprint, while increasing business efficiency and connecting people across geographies and time zones.

Acrobat solutions allow our customers to reduce the use of paper documents, while Adobe Connect makes it possible for people to collaborate and communicate globally in real time, helping reduce business travel and its related environmental impact.

For example, the U.S. Government Printing Office was able to save 20 million tons of paper over five years by using Acrobat and LiveCycle to generate, authenticate and share documents electronically. Adobe Connect enabled more than 50,000 SAP employees to communicate around the world instantly, reducing the company’s travel by as much as 90%.

And all along we have been focused with our Customer Experience Management platform on delivering highly personalized, engaging online interactions between enterprises and their customers to power great customer experiences that build brand loyalty without all the environmental damage caused by burning fuel for worldwide travel and wasting paper when electronic means would suffice.

That’s why I found it so interesting when I heard recently about an acquaintance who received a personal, handwritten note – not a personalized email – from leading online retailer Amazon.com, thanking him for his business over the past nine years.  That act of personal outreach had a marked impact.  He not only felt valued by Amazon.com after receiving this note, he now associates a human face with the company.

Can this be done in more environmentally friendly ways?  Of course it can.  Record a quick Flash video and send it on to someone you want to thank.  Send them a personalized PDF portfolio complete with pictures of past experiences together.  The Amazon story is about personal touch – about a real person inside a company reaching out to another real person to establish trust and loyalty.  Just because we are using greener means to communicate doesn’t mean we have to lose the essence of one-to-one personal communication.  In fact in many cases the technology allows us to do it more effectively.

This act of a real person at Amazon.com reaching out to a customer in a very personal way underscores the desire for us to connect with each other, even in our always-on, always-connected online business and personal lives.

We have powerful technology that enables us to know our customers and connect across geographies without the need to ever leave our offices — and that’s a great thing. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that behind the technology lie people.

And so on this Earth Day, I’m going to follow the “people-powered” examples of the Earth Day Network and leverage our great technologies to send something personal – you should do the same!

– Rob

Follow me on Twitter for more perspectives.

I had the pleasure of hosting an 11^th grader from Yerba Buena High School for a day at Adobe as part of the YWCA’s Project Inspire Job Shadow on Tuesday. If you aren’t familiar with Project Inspire, take a look at YWCA site. Even though it’s a pilot program, the YWCA has had solid success in helping these San Jose students gain course credits and stay on track for graduation.

While this day was outside the regular Project Inspire offerings, it fit perfectly with their mission of helping students see the sort of opportunities they could have if they continue to achieve in school.

We took our student for a tour of our facility and she sat in on a few meetings about Adobe’s Wellness programs and our plans for the Best Places to Work application. I asked some of our employees, who are new college graduates, to join us for lunch so they could share their journey through school and into the workplace. She was interested to hear about the global nature of our workforce and how these employees, even though they are fresh out of school, have traveled significantly.

Reflecting on today’s events, the one thing that stands out to me most is that we need to challenge our students to think well beyond high school graduation day. It’s so important that our students set their personal bar high for their future, career and opportunities that are available to them.

Adobe’s corporate social responsibility programs – which include everything from our conservation efforts to how we contribute to the communities where we do business – are something we take quite a bit of pride in.

That’s why this week we were thrilled to learn that Adobe moved up to number seven on Newsweek’s 2010 Green Rankings – an annual list of the top 500 most environmentally conscious U.S. companies.  Out of a possible score of 100, Adobe’s Green Rankings green score came in at an impressive 94.15. Other well known companies in the top 10 include Dell, HP, Intel, Johnson & Johnson and Nike.

Newsweek teamed up with three leading environmental research organizations to compile the most comprehensive rankings possible. To view the Newsweek Green Rankings in their entirety, click here: Green Rankings: U.S. Companies.

Environmental responsibility is a priority for Adobe and is part of the fabric of our corporate culture. We are proud of our multiple US Green Building Council LEED® certifications and of our continued efforts to lead in the adoption of green technologies for our building operations [See recent post: Fired Up About Fuel Cells].

Thanks are in order for Adobe employees worldwide who have helped us achieve this recognition through their ideas, ongoing participation in sustainability programs and commitment to going green!

Fuel Cells at San Jose Headquarters